Rotary Trip to Scotland

Today was a much clearer day for me. It started after what was supposed to be an 8-hour sleep turned into a 10-hour sleep when I turned off my alarm. Turns out I really needed the 10 hours so I’m not complaining.
Our wonderful liason Mike met us around 10-11am (he got here around 10, we finally were ready to leave at 11) along with a transplanted American named Henry. We drove to Edinburgh (that’s “Edin-boro” for the Americans in the crowd), had a spot of coffee with a nice man named Chris and took the bus to the city proper.
Edinburgh is quite a fantastic place to walk around in, and we had fabulous weather today - sunny and not too hot. We took a guided tour of the unique/interesting/bizarre new Parliment building, then walked around and through Edinburgh castle. Quite breathtaking.
We had to be at a Rotary meeting at 6 for half-6 (um, get there around 6, dinner is at 6:30), but we had time to hit a drugstore to get me some gel shoe insoles, and a pub to get me a real Guinness. Yum.
The Rotary meeting was about what you’d expect: we met some folks and chatted, I tried to get a computer with Japanese menus to connect to a projector, we had a nice dinner and then learned of the art of the Japanese Tea Ceremony.

Right.

So, ok, there was another Rotary-sponsered person at the meeting. Actually, no, there were two: one from Germany and one from Japan. Both were ambassadorial scholars, which is a one-year foreign study scholarship sponsored by Rotary. The Japanese woman was the speaker for the meeting and did a great presentation on the Japanese Tea Ceremony. And I wasn’t able to get her computer to talk to the projector, but someone else was.

We had a nice trip back to the cars on the upper deck of a double-decker bus! That was fun, especially when we got to our stop and I almost fell on my face coming down the stairs.

Scottish language note for the day: “still water or fizzy?” means non-carbonated or carbonated. I was asked the question after I’d requested water and said something like “Yes, I’d still like water”. Everyone found it quite amusing.

Scottish travel thrill of the day: apart from the double-decker bus, traveling around a traffic circle while on the left side of the street will really get the adrenaline flowing for us “right-siders”. I think I’ll get used to it at some point, but I keep thinking we’re going to have a head-on.

Jason

This entry was posted on Monday, September 11th, 2006 at 10:30 pm and is filed under Jason's trip updates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.